Hits vs. Visitors : Website Traffic Monitoring
Has your business ever been approached to advertise on a website? Were you offered a claim that said something like “Our website gets “60,000 hits per month?” If so, I suggest being suspicious of that sales pitch.
A “HIT” is not the same as a “Visitor.” A hit is counted when an individual element of a webpage is accessed. A popular news web page that has many graphics, news feeds, pictures and other elements might have 75 elements on it. One visitor coming to this page would then count as 75 hits.
REAL website traffic numbers. Notice HITS in light blue and VISITORS in orange.
You may find that a claim of 60,000 hits may equate to only 16 visitors per day on that website. It can equate to any number of visitor counts, depending on each web page and its content and construction, but you get the idea.
What is a Hit?
A web page is typically made up of a number of individual elements. An element is a photo, a graphic, a javascript, a css stylesheet, etc. When a web page is viewed, each of these elements is requested by the web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc) from the web server, and each file request increases the hit-count for the website.
A “Hit” is counted each time one of these individual elements are accessed. Read more
